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The thing is… you run across a lot of people to claim to be SEO experts out there, they know who they are, we can tell they’re noobs by their keyword stuffing. I went back in time (just on Google unfortunately) and found articles as far back as 2012 about avoiding this. We’ve know about it forever.

It’s The Internet… It’s Pure Anarchy, Right?

No, it’s really a finely structured system that is so well thought out it seems like anarchy, like the over arching complexity if natural phenomenon that seems chaotic but upon closer inspection is governed by strict rules. The first thing it comes down to is everyone wanting a keyword rich url. Somehow, in any way possible, everyone wants to rank #1 in search with their awesome URL that’s branded and engineered perfectly for their industry.

Fact of the matter is, the largest online companies usually aren’t the ones with keyword rich urls, go figure. Think about that, they could have dumped tons of cash into whatever URL they wanted, but they didn’t. The ones that do have keyword rich URLs, those are the ones that look like spam sites and are screaming for our attention, or to just be remembered somehow. I’d almost bet if you rattled off your top 5 favorite sites, in almost any category, not a darn one of them has a bad-ass keyword rich url. They worked for it and that’s what you need to do.

A keyword rich URL isn’t a magic bullet. The internet just seems like pure anarchy because a month ago some music video about chickens or something from China got shared a million times and the week before that… there were Too Many Cooks! It does seem like Internet anarchy but it’s not. These crazy videos and websites find wild popularity not because of their URL’s but because of the content they publish, that’s not anarchy. Don’t just “stuff” your URL with keyword phrases just because those words pertain to your industry either.

Or maybe you bought a keyword rich domain name… might as well put the cherry on top and stuff that site with keywords too… right? Wrong. It’s long been known that you don’t do this. Just last week I worked on a site where the urls were great & pertained to the page content, but then…. on every url they threw some keywords in at the end. For no reason their web admin just tacked them on.

I was mortified partly because someone still thinks thats a good strategy but mostly because I was now involved in a project that (unknowingly) had been internally sabotaged. Don’t do that, it’s crazy. You’d be using your time and mental capacity much better writing one solid article than tapping out random industry related keywords in your URL.

Are You Worried Your Stuffing?

Stuffing is tedious by nature, you often end up picking through text and seeing where you can throw in another reference to your keyword phase. If you’re doing that, you’re stuffing and you’re going to get caught.

Keyword Stuffing is that old school black hat technique to try and rank better by loading your urls and or domain name with keywords. Yes, the words might pertain to your industry but pages on your website should be about something, specifically. All your pages shouldn’t be about your industry generally. Use specific pages to optimize for the product categories that are specific to your industry.

We all know large sites start somewhere and maybe there are a few pages on your site that cover several topics but eventually, for your site to grow, you’re going to need to invest some time into really developing the products on your site to stand alone and be presented on a single page. All businesses have reasons or competitive advantages for customers to choose them over a rival business. Each product you have can stand alone and has it’s peculiarities and advantages. Showcase your strengths.

The Stuffing Isn’t The Best Part Anyway

Short and relevant is the key. You want someone to remember your URL not overwhelm them with jargon and complexity. Stuffing your page doesn’t make your message or value clear and takes up valuable time that could be spent on long-term Search Engine Optimization strategies that don’t end up shooting you in the foot.

Write real content that you’re passionate about publishing. Check out this video about SEO from google webmasters, it sums up things nicely.

It’s quite easy to embed video on your website. Getting it on your website is one thing, getting people to actually watch your video is a whole new challenge.

One of the key things you can do to increase the number of views your video gets is by uploading the video to YouTube. YouTube is a place where people already are so that greatly increases the likelihood of your video actually being seen.

Another advantage is that you can easily share your video through a link or an video embed right on your website.

The benefits of serving your video through YouTube are numerous but one of the key advantages is that your video will be optimized no matter what kind of device the website visitor is on. If you’re trying to upload a video file to the back-end of your website and just put that video file link into a page or use some widget or HTML to display the actual video it will probably work most of the time because modern devices are smart.

But let’s do a quick thought experiment and consider a mobile user.

Let’s be imaginative and assume the video file is only 13mb large. That video might need to be completely downloaded, the whole 13MB file, to the users mobile device before playing, it might significantly increase the amount of time your site takes to load and consider the mobile data usage the user suffers in downloading an entire video they might not even watch.

YouTube takes advantage of video streaming so all that is delivered is what the user requests and it’s optimized for whichever device your website visitor is on, desktop computer, tablet or mobile phone.

Here are tons of great resources online to get you started with a YouTube Account. I enjoy the videos of David Walsh:

After you create your youtube account and establsih yourself with a few videos think about setting up a custom YouTube Channel URL or “Vanity URL” for your YouTube Channel.

“A featured image represent the contents, mood, or theme of a post or page. Posts and pages can have a single featured image, which many themes and tools can use to enhance the presentation of your site.”– WordPress.com

The feature image you choose for your article might just be the one thing that entices your visitor to click, read and find out more about what you have to say, your products or services, so choose carefully.

The official definition is actually pretty good. Your feature image should be representative of your content, tell a story if possible, or at least catch the viewers attention within the context of your content.

I always invite you to find out more about feature images by checking out the official wordpress documentation online!

The power of the publishing panel inside the wordpress content management system is often an overlooked gem of your brand’s or businesses workflow. I this unobtrusive little space you’ll find tools to save your work as a draft, something I encourage you to do often, as well as access the revisions of those saves.

The real publication power comes into play once you hit the scheduling options. Being able to schedule my posts has been a valuable ability over the years because the moments I spend writing aren’t always the best moments to publish that material, let’s say it’s really late at night.

I want that post to go up on my website and get distributed to social networks like facebook and twitter at a time when I know they’re most likely to be seen. I always end up scheduling the post, even if it’s just for the next day.

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Just Save As Draft

Use The Publish Button Carefully! If you’ve got social sharing options configured like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus or LinkedIn, the post will be broadcast to all your social channels.

It’s best to just save your post as a draft until you’ve got it perfect for publication. [/box]

Clients are enjoying a whole new editing experience with the new WordPress 3.9.2 update titled “Smith”.

The focus of the latest update by the team at WordPress was to bridge the gap between the experience you have editing your article while creating content and the look and feel of the article while on your site. Many content management systems suffer from this downfall, especially the content management systems that don’t utilize what we developers call “in-line editing”. In my personal experience the editors that do give reasonable displays of content are “saftey” creation tools for beginners and lack the real power of a true creational interface. That causes a problem because that power is the exact thing most businesses that are serious about online publishing really need.

It’s good to see the team at Automatic is working toward bridging the gap within a professional publishing environment. One of the many reasons wordpress is king.

This quick video highlights some of the new functionality and features you might want to try to test drive inside your creation tools if you haven’t already.